Earlier this week I noticed a minor brute-force attack against our managed WordPress hosting. The attack lasted for 72 hours and deployed around 2000 unique bots. The botnet attempted on average 100 logins per hour while rotating bots to avoid triggering our automatic defense systems.

I was unaware that Facebook recently had started to add a unique click identifier to all outbound links on facebook.com. Coincidentally, one of the security measures of this server is to disallow query strings as part of the URL. Thus, any visitors coming over from Facebook were suddenly blocked and banned on sight.

A while back I lost access to the email address with which I had subscribed to the slackware-security mailing list. This does not please Bob, so today I logged into my webmail account and sent along a new request to join slackware-security and slackware-announce. The response I got in return gave me a good laugh and a swift feel of nostalgia.

I’ve never really felt all that good about storing my passwords on the public cloud, but after we started using LastPass at work I somehow got lulled into adopting it for personal use as well.

So why is this release noteworthy? Well, I experienced an issue with the previous release (Tor 0.3.4.7) where I was unable to get sandboxing to work due to the following error:

The highly anticipated continuation of last year’s riveting tale of fear and loathing on the dark web. I hereby offer a full disclosure of attack patterns observed against my onion and my WordPress installation, respectively.

Gentoo developers recently marked mod_security-2.9.1 and modsecurity-crs 3.0.2 as stable on amd64, thus allowing me to move on from the dormant ModSecurity 2.7.7 release. Good thing I got this update on a Sunday though as it turned out to be more than a simple drop in replacement.

PHP 7.2 just went stable on amd64 providing me with an opportunity to finally migrate away from PHP 7.0. Unlike the PHP 7.1 releases, PHP 7.2 offers significant performance improvements.

Gentoo recently marked Tor 0.3.4.7 as stable on amd64 so without further ado I’m launching my v3 onion. This hidden service is available at the following 56 bit long address: 4hpfzoj3tgyp2w7sbe3gnmphqiqpxwwyijyvotamrvojl7pkra7z7byd.onion

So I had just implemented DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) on a Postfix server and was confident that the signing process was correct, but on testing, the recipient’s SMTP server insisted that the message had failed authentication due to an invalid public key.